Staircase Books, paperback
Publication Date: December 15, 2025
Publisher Marketing: Cadet opens in the freezing cold of Ranger School, the US Army’s most difficult combat leadership course. The poems proceed through the intricate wreckage of deployment and return, family and erotic life, masculine performance and intrapsychic reality, dreaming and waking. A graduate of West Point, veteran of two combat deployments, and Harvard-trained clinical psychologist, Benjamin Bellet sheds new light on the veteran experience in the post-9/11 era with language that integrates psychoanalytic nuance, lyrical pathos, and the graffiti of the barracks latrine.
